Leadership on the right still has no freaking clue

Writing at the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove offered some advice about how to defeat the anticipated onslaught of socialized medicine. In the column, he used an example of socialized medicine he helped to promote to illustrate why Democratic socialized medicine is bad, but Republican socialized medicine is good:

Advocates say a government-run insurance program is needed to provide competition for private health insurance. But 1,300 companies sell health insurance plans. That’s competition enough. The results of robust private competition to provide the Medicare drug benefit underscore this. When it was approved, the Congressional Budget Office estimated it would cost $74 billion a year by 2008. Nearly 100 providers deliver the drug benefit, competing on better benefits, more choices, and lower prices. So the actual cost was $44 billion in 2008 — nearly 41% less than predicted. No government plan was needed to guarantee competition’s benefits.

The last time I checked, Medicare Part D is all about redistributionism. One can’t even make the flimsy argument that current beneficiaries have paid into the system. I work and they take money from me to offset the price of medicine for seniors. What’s worse, they don’t have enough money to pay the bills. As a result, my children will end up picking up most of the tab, along with the interest charges.

I was beginning to have some hope that the GOP would at least take on the Obama administration regarding socialized medicine, but it appears they don’t even understand the rhetoric of free-market economics anymore. What’s next in the GOP playbook? Directly quoting Karl Marx?

Like this:

As a Swiss MD, I’ve seen how even small doses of socialized medicine ultimately hurt patients and rises costs. Quality of care generally suffers when rationing bureaucracies step in between a patient and his doctor.

America has been a global leader in medical progress mainly because it has not fully done away with liberty and market in health care. Socialized medicine will not only be costly and will hurt the access of americans to care and therapeutic innovation, it will also drive away from health care the forces of charity and the power of private philanthropy that have been the honor American care for centuries.

Karl Rove is right in condemning socialist health care reform even though his op-ed only touches the tip of the iceberg.